WARNING: Some of the details in this story may be disturbing to readers. Discretion is advised.
After the Persian New Year holiday hiatus, reports of chemical attacks on Iranian school girls are once again being reported.
Whatever the substance is, thousands of young girls are falling ill while in class across Iran.
It’s left them coughing, choking, and unable to breathe and many have been hospitalized.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is tracking and mapping out how widespread the attacks are.
Saeed Ghasseminejad, a Senior Advisor and Financial Economist at the FDD says “there are more than 300 deliberate chemical attacks are confirmed.”
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The attacks impact perhaps thousands of girls across the country, says Ghasseminejad, and he adds that the data could be two to three times higher than what has been reported.
The first reported poisoning was reported in the religious city of Qom in November 2022. Ghasseminejad, says the first 15 attacks happened in Qom and in March the attacks peaked across the country. It stopped during the Persian New Year holidays because children were out of class for two weeks but the attacks are ramping up in hundreds of cities in Iran.
Canadian Iranians with family back in Iran are terrified by what they’re seeing.
Tara is a member of the Iranian Justice Collective (IJC), a nonpartisan group supporting revolutionaries in Iran who are fighting to secure a free and democratic society. She did not provide Global News with her last name due to safety concerns.
Her group, which has members across Canada, is gathering evidence from their sources in Iran to push world bodies to investigate these alleged chemical attacks.
“Imagine sending your kids to school and then getting a call that your kids are in hospital. How does that make you feel?” she said.
“Schools should be the safest place for kids. But now they are being deprived of their fundamental right to education and safety of kids is at risk. It’s very heartbreaking” Tara continued.
Human Rights groups across the globe are demanding Iran allow independent investigators. In March, the United Nations expressed outrage at the “deliberate poisoning of more than 1,200 schoolgirls” in Iran and blamed the state for not protecting them. UN experts also expressed “grave concern that a journalist who was covering these attacks was arrested in the city of Qom.”
“Similarly shocking was the video circulated on social media of a mother violently beaten in front of her children’s school, simply for demanding information,” said UN experts in an online statement.
The Islamic Republic calls the schoolgirls’ poisonings a heinous act and is not taking responsibility.
But human rights activists are doubtful.
Iran, they point out, is a totalitarian security state where authorities track and arrest protestors through facial recognition.
This is yet another form of a gender-based attack that is ongoing since the first reported case in November, according to activists and nonpartisan groups.
Gen Z and girls have been at the forefront of uprisings sparked by the in-custody death of Mahsa Amini, which threatens to topple the regime.
Tara believes the Islamic Republic is trying to suppress protestors by punishing them with poison attacks.
Ghasseminejad, says the attacks are sending a message to “punish and scare” them.
The Islamic Republic, he says, “is trying to tell the Iranian society it will do unthinkable things.”
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